Conventional surgical and medical tables are designed to provide a support platform for holding patients in an appropriate position during surgery or a procedure. Floor space in hospital and out-patient operating rooms is at a premium. Therefore, the design of the surgical table must afford surgical team members ready access to various body parts of the patient from various locations along the table before, during or after the surgical or medical procedure and yet minimize the amount of floorspace occupied.
During the surgical or medical procedure, the patient must be maintained stationary. To that end, the surgical table is anchored to the floor in a fixed position within the operating room or procedure room. However, the surgical table must be movable so that it can be repositioned within the operating room or removed from the operating room when unused. The surgical table is repositioned to clean the floor space about the table following the medical procedure. The surgical table may require repositioning to introduce a different surgical table, which is tailored for a specialized procedure, into the operating room.
Conventional medical or surgical tables are mobilized by providing them with multiple pivoting or swivel casters. In one common design for anchoring the position of the surgical table, a plurality of retractable, vertically-movable floor locks are extended to contact the floor. The casters may remain in floor contact or the floor locks may raise the table so that the casters no longer contact the floor. In an elevated position, the table is supported on the legs rather than on the casters. However, such conventional mechanisms are mechanically complex because a set of vertically movable legs must be incorporated into the table design.
The patient support surfaces of conventional surgical tables may only be lowered to within about thirty-one inches of the floor. Because the patient not conveniently located, surgical team members must stand during surgical procedures, which increases fatigue. For certain types of surgeries, it would be advantageous for surgical team members to operate in a seated position.
Surgical team members must work in a close proximity to the patient. If the support surface is significantly wider that the width of the patient's body, then the surgical team members cannot stand near to the patient's body. Users of conventional surgical tables, however, commonly utilize portions of the support surface adjacent to the patient's shoulders as a repository for objects such as instruments, syringes and the like. Therefore, the support surface near the patient's shoulders will be wide enough to accommodate this common usage. As a result, the surgical team members must lean against the support surface and/or extend their arms outwardly so that all portions of the patient's body are within arm's length. In extreme instances, all portions of the patient's upper torso may not be accessible from a single side of the surgical table.
What is needed, therefore, is a surgical table that optimizes the usage of the space on the patient support surface and the surrounding floorspace and that is mobile and yet can be secured against movement when performing surgery.